


But They Wouldn't Follow

by thelightninginme



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Major Trespasser Spoilers, Platonic Relationships, Post-Trespasser, The Bad Ending, Vague Tagging to Avoid Spoilers, angst with a tiny glimmer of hope at the end, but tagging to be safe, not really any worse than what's in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 11:31:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelightninginme/pseuds/thelightninginme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If there is any love yet to be wrung out of her broken heart, Dorian can have it, since Solas clearly has no use for it."</p>
<p>A moment between Dorian and Ellana in the aftermath. Contains MAJOR Trespasser spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But They Wouldn't Follow

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, BioWare, let's emotionally betray the character with the trust/intimacy issues h-ha haaaha ha.
> 
> I've always wanted to write something about the friendship between Dorian and a non-romanced/woman Inquisitor but I don't know why I got plunnied so hard for the NIGHTMARE SCENARIO that is Qun!Bull. The title comes from Susanne Sundfør's "Darlings" which you should definitely [listen to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2TdPVX3fl8) while reading for maximum pain.

She probably cannot stay in this room forever. The surgeon always nods approvingly when she changes the bandages, after all, and tells her the wound is healing nicely. Why shouldn’t she be satisfied, after all? Her role is nearly done. It’s Ellana that has to do the hard work now, relearning the minutiae of everyday life all over again.

Needing so much sleep will no longer fly as an excuse, either - as the pain has lessened, the healer’s concoctions have grown less potent and no longer drag her so far under. And so the dreams have started. They follow her into the waking world, so that she wakes with sweat beading between her breasts and short of breath, as if she has been outrunning someone in her sleep. Once, she is so sure that someone is in the room with her that chokes on a scream when she catches her own reflection out of the corner of her eye. But in all fairness to her, Ellana’s reflection has become so alien it might as well represent a stranger in the room with her. She staggers out of bed and stands in front of the mirror, slightly repulsed by what she sees but unable to turn away all the same. Most disconcerting is the loss of her hand, of course; what’s left of her arm ends abruptly, like a clipped sentence. Her clothes hang loose on her skinny frame, and her wide eyes stare out from deep within her pale, bare face. Her hair, normally braided neatly, is wild, too, after hours thrashing about in bed. She will have to cut it, she thinks. Easier to manage that way. She has no idea what has become of her bow; it doesn’t matter now, anyway. Maybe she forgot it. Most likely someone has put it away for her, where she will not have to see it.

Behind her, the door swings open loudly and without warning; inexplicably terrified at the sudden intrusion into her sanctuary, Ellana whirls, pressing her back against the mirror. Dorian is standing in the doorway of her guest room at the Winter Palace, a bottle of wine swinging loosely from one hand. She knows that she looks halfway like a demon, but honestly, his countenance isn’t much better. His red eyes swing from Ellana to her empty but disheveled bed. He sways there in the doorway half a beat more, and finally says, “Oh. You might have been sleeping.”

“Then try opening the door like a _person_ next time,” she gasps, voice hoarse from disuse and heavy with sleep. “ _I_ was the one raised in the woods.”

He ignores this. “You’re in a for real treat when you go out there,” he sneers, and she hasn’t seen him like this in a long time. “I thought we were the ones doing the Inquisiting? The Council thinks you and I must have been in on it. They want to know what…what state secrets you gave the elves and what I leaked to the Qun. Well, no worries there for the Orlesians, it’s Tevinter that ought to be worried. Oh yes, that’s going to make me _fucking_ popular at home. Don’t you see? They think we’re faking. Are you this good of an actor, Lavellan? Because I’m certainly not. Or maybe we should be flattered that they think we’re much smarter than we apparently really are.”

“Are you just going to rant at me from the door, or do you want to come in here and talk?”

He does come in but not without slamming the door behind him; Ellana flinches and Dorian looks a little shamefaced at this. He stares at her arm for half a moment, then catches himself doing it and drags his eyes up to meet hers. “What are you doing? You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“I’m fine,” she mumbles, but he is right, she ought to be sitting, at least. Ellana crosses the room and lowers herself onto the bed, a little wobbly, but at least he offers her the courtesy of letting her do it herself.

This is not new, she and Dorian sitting together, a bottle of wine between them. Actually, Dorian bursting in already mostly drunk is not new either. The first time he does it, after they return from Redcliffe, she is nervous, unsure what to do. He paces around her room in Skyhold, going on almost incoherently about how he plans to leave, pausing every once in a while to dare Ellana to force him to stay. Eventually she understands and guides him over to her bed, thin arms wrapped around his trembling shoulders. “No one’s making you do anything, Dorian,” she soothes. “I’d like you to stay, but you’re right, I can’t force you.” Still, she cannot let him go anywhere like this, and eventually she persuades him to stay at least until the morning. When they wake up he does not follow through on his threats, only murmurs something about a bit of a headache and retreats to the library.

There is another time where he finds her in her room, her fingers worrying at her newly bare face, hand-mirror smashed to bits on the floor. That night neither of them sleep, and as the sun comes up Dorian teaches her increasingly foul names to call a man that he has picked up in Tevinter and beyond, until she laughs out of sheer exhaustion. The truth is, it’s not always sad; in fact, most of the time, it’s quiet afternoons in the library. They simply enjoy each other’s company. If Ellana doesn't know any better, she would say that Solas is jealous.

The worst, though, is the day Josephine hands her a letter, dry-eyed but biting her trembling lip. Solas tucks her head under his chin and holds her while she shakes, guides her to safe places in her dreams, but there is still a little part of her - angry, lost - that wonders if he would be _glad_ if not for her grief. There is no doubt in her heart, though, when Dorian sweeps her into his arms, for once not caring who sees, and murmurs condolences in her ear.

Solas understands that the love she bears for the both of them is different but equally fierce, but he doesn’t understand why. True, maybe on the surface she and Dorian have nothing in common, but Solas wasn’t _there_. He didn’t watch himself die to buy her a few more precious seconds. He wasn’t there at the exact moment that closing the Breach stopped being something she _had_ to do and became something she _wanted_ to do - but Dorian was. Solas hadn’t seen the future that she and Dorian had, and therefore he couldn’t truly understand what was at stake. Or maybe that’s the problem. Maybe he knew all along. Maybe Ellana is the one who never understood. Cassandra once called her self-assured, but Ellana has never felt further from that. Clearly, she understood nothing. She knew nothing. She was always a mere child, moving clumsily through a world of gods and spies, and they all outmaneuvered her with no effort. Except, in the end, when years of Ben-Hassrath training isn't enough in a face of a mage, a hunter, and Cole’s poisoned daggers.

Ellana is the one who delivers the final blow; her arm is throbbing in agony and her blood thrumming in her ears, but somehow she still hears Dorian behind her. She can't even look at him.

_“What are you waiting for?”_

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, though it sounds woefully inadequate, especially when she turns and really looks at him. The curtains are drawn, of course, and she studies his tousled hair and bloodshot eyes in the dim light. “I should have…I should’ve…” She doesn’t know what it is that she should have done except that she does know. Reports and missions from Par Vollen that would make Leliana’s eyes light up, but they seem meaningless now, ash in her fingers, especially compared to a little tune sung in the Herald’s Rest, sung loudly and out of tune but with no lack of enthusiasm.

“No, I don’t think so," Dorian snaps. "You don’t get this one. I was the fool, the one so desperate for a scrap of - ” He scrubs a hand over his face. He wants to rage, something to rail against, but Ellana is too tired to respond in kind. “It’s my regret, not yours.”

“What else do I have besides regrets? I can’t hunt anymore. I have no clan to return to. No other clan would take me, either, not the flat-eared Inquisitor, who willingly gave up her vallaslin. The Inquisition can’t continue, not rotten out from the inside like this. Solas took that from me, too. He took my arm, and he took everything I ever thought I knew about my people. I don’t even recognize my face in the mirror. He took that too. He took dreaming from me. He took every measure of peace I took back for myself over the last two years, because now I’m always going to wonder if there’s something I could’ve done differently. If there’s anything I can still do.”

“I’m going to wonder, too,” he whispers.

Ellana carefully tugs the wine bottle out of his hand and takes a swig of it for herself, even though she’s hardly had a thing to eat lately and her mouth feels like cotton. She sets the bottle gently on the finely patterned carpet. “The fact is that neither of us were enough.” Ellana can say these things because her wound is not as raw as Dorian’s; freshly reopened, yes, but an old wound that aches, not the sharp jab of a hot knife. Two years had, as time tends to do, cooled the hurt into something less intense, something she could live with. But seeing him again has ruined her a second time.

“At least he loves you. Or did, at one time. You can at least take comfort in that.”

“I ruined his plans. I was a distraction.”

“But you weren’t a…a _plaything_. To fuck and to fuck with.” Dorian breaks off in a sob and leans heavily on her good shoulder.

Neither of them were enough. And both of them are ruined by it. But at least they’re together. If there is any love yet to be wrung out of her broken heart, Dorian can have it, since Solas clearly has no use for it. She can’t even hug him properly, but she tries anyway, wrapping her arm around him and pulling him against her broken body. “I love you, Dorian,” she murmurs, and this has always been true, but she has never said it aloud before. “Nothing you say or do could change that. And you have to tell me if I ever do anything that hurts you, because that’s the last thing I would ever want to do.” It almost surprises her, the depth and fierceness of this feeling, and she realizes she has hardly felt much of anything since Solas let go of her ruined hand. Solas cannot - or will not let himself - love anything in this world enough to let the old world go, and that is what hurts her the most. He has left her with the hard work. Somehow, she must find a way to love Solas and this world enough to save both of them. When Solas walked away - not once, but twice - Ellana thought maybe that was his strength, but now she begins to wonder if staying is her strength and his weakness.

“I love you,” she says again, and then she begins to sob, so much so that it’s hard to catch her breath. Dorian holds her very tightly, almost painfully so, and she can feel his tears hot on her neck. For a while there is nothing but the hurt. Even if she could speak through the tears her mind is blank. But she clings to Dorian with all the strength left to her, and eventually the storm subsides. Her sobs slow to the occasional hitch. Dorian looses his grip a little, keeping one arm around Ellana’s shoulders and mopping at his face with the other. There really isn’t much to say, at least nothing that they haven’t already said in ways without words.

“I don’t really want to go back out there,” he admits finally.

“I know. Stay here,” she answers, her voice thick with tears and the early onset of sleep’s irresistible call. “And I don’t really want to be alone, anyway.” Nor does she want Dorian to be alone, either. He can find something to occupy himself - rearrange all the furniture in the room, for all she cares, but her grief for the both of them has left her too exhausted to do much right then except curl up against the pillow and hope for no dreams. But Dorian stretches out beside her, holding her hand, an anchor point for the both of them.

“Incidentally, Ellana, I love you too. Thank you.” Maybe he thinks she is already asleep and doesn’t hear. But if it meant even half as much to him to hear those words as it does to her, then Ellana is glad she said it first.

She sleeps without dreaming.


End file.
